


Simple but Decisive

by Raven_Knight



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Injured!Kirk, M/M, This Simple Feeling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 21:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8637946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raven_Knight/pseuds/Raven_Knight
Summary: He woke up lying on a biobed. It was Sickbay, but not his Sickbay.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [WHAT IS AOS!KIRK DOING IN STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE?!](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/243037) by babyblainers. 



> This fic seeks to answer that question. (Reference picture from that post is below.)
> 
> Enjoy the fic, everyone! ~ RK

He woke up lying on a biobed. “Indications of some neurological trauma,” an older man’s voice announced over the gentle and rhythmic sounds of wherever it was he’d ended up. _Oh my God,_ he thought, trying not to move to give even a hint of his being conscious. _I have brain trauma?_ His second thought hit him seconds afterwards. _I survived? How?_ He struggled to keep his breathing regular as though he were still sleeping. He needed to learn more, needing to figure out where he could possibly have been taken. _How could I have survived?_

“The power pouring through that mindmeld must have been staggering.” The same man spoke. _Who is this guy? Where_ am _I?_

He heard their footsteps cross the room, wherever that was, but they didn’t stop next to him. They went somewhere else. Somewhere near him, though. A moment after they stopped walking, a different man spoke. “Spock.”

“Jim,” came a gravelly answer. Kirk almost gave himself away and sat up at the revelation, but stopped himself quickly, resulting in what could have been interpreted as a muscle spasm. He knew that voice. He’d heard it in that frozen cave on Delta Vega. Spock, but not his Spock. Old Spock. The _other_ Spock. “I should have known.”

“Were you right? About V’ger?” Kirk opened his eyes and turned his head just enough to see what was going on to the right of his bed. He saw the backs of two men standing beside a biobed. _Sickbay,_ he concluded. _I’m in Sickbay._ Not his Sickbay, not at all, but some version of a Sickbay.

Kirk watched as the reclined Spock nodded. “A lifeform of its own. Conscious, living entity.”

“A living machine?” the woman – a doctor, Kirk realized – asked.

“She considers the Enterprise a living machine. That’s why the probe refers to our ship as an entity.” This man took Kirk’s attention. He radiated authority and intelligence. That voice. He knew that voice, too. Why? The mindmeld with the other Spock…the Spock now in front of him on that bed. Jim, Spock had called this man. Had Kirk not already been lying down, he suspected he may have fallen down when he understood that the man whose face he could not see, the man who commanded the room in an effortless way he had not yet achieved turned out to be his alternate self. This man was the very James T. Kirk that the Spock on Delta Vega knew in his lifetime. Kirk stared at this other version of himself and felt incredibly young.

Once Spock began to talk again, Kirk focused on the conversation instead of his own insecurities. “I saw V’ger’s planet. A planet populated by living machines. Unbelievable technology.” Spock looked directly at Kirk’s older, other self. “V’ger has knowledge that spans this universe. And yet, with all its pure logic, V’ger is barren, cold. No mystery, no beauty. I should have—” Spock closed his eyes tiredly. “—known.”

Something in Jim Kirk cracked with curiosity and dawning understanding.

“Known?” Jim leaned forward to touch Spock’s bare shoulders. Kirk watched enraptured by the body language between these two alternate versions of himself and his own first officer. “Known what? Spock.”

“Captain!”

Jim whirled, struck the other man’s grip on him away, and chastised him with a single word. “Bones!” Kirk looked at the older man dressed in medical white. _Bones? Oh my God, we’re all here._ Jim glared at Bones for only a moment, the doctor looking surprised by his friend’s actions, but offering no further comment of fight. _My Bones would be in my face if I did that._

Jim turned back to Spock again and leaned in closer. Kirk knew, even with what little he could see, that his other self had replaced his hands on Spock’s shoulders. _No way would my Spock let me touch him like that,_ he thought bitterly. Clearly the relationship between his counterpart and the Ambassador Spock he knew was much deeper than the one he had with his own Spock. Even as each second grew more and more painful to observe, Kirk could not possibly look away.  Not now. “Spock, what should you have known? What should you have known?”

From his vantage point, Kirk saw Spock’s hand raise and clasp the arm of the man hovering at his side. “Jim.” The tension in Jim’s back and shoulder disappeared in that moment, and he stood a little taller. He heard the soft meeting of their hands. Kirk’s lips parted in surprise. _Apparently, they were_ very _close._ Closer than he’d even guessed. “ _This_ _simple feeling_ …is beyond V’ger’s comprehension.” Kirk watched, his own lips parting further in shock at the gesture, as Jim raised his free hand. His body blocked its destination, but Kirk didn’t need to see in order to know where that hand now rested. He knew that this Jim had folded Spock’s hand between his own. As though confirming his knowledge, the Jim beside the bed nodded.

What had begun as a crack in Jim Kirk’s very essence now slowly broke.

“No meaning, no hope. Jim, no answers,” Spock clarified. “It’s asking questions.”

“What questions?” Jim pressed. Kirk somehow already knew them. The same ones were filling his own mind.

“Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?”

Kirk closed his eyes, but not soon enough to keep his tears at bay. He let them trail across his skin to absorb into the pillow. He wanted to leave. He had no idea how, but he wanted to get out of this place. This painful place. “Bridge to Captain!” On instinct, Kirk opened his eyes again, ready to answer, but then remembered that this wasn’t his Sickbay, and therefore wasn’t his ship. He was not the captain here. That title belonged to the man currently walking to the nearby comms unit.

“I need Spock on the Bridge,” his alternate self said to Bones and the female doctor. Then, he left the Sickbay. Kirk looked back at Spock on the biobed and ached with the Vulcan as he recognized the way in which Spock looked at his counterpart’s departure. Kirk knew he looked at his own Spock the very same way.

“Now, Spock,” Bones said in a rougher, more weathered version of the Southern drawl Kirk knew well. “If I didn’t know my Vulcan anatomy – which I do – even I would think that what just went on here was not exactly a common occurrence in Vulcan culture.” Kirk was confused. _This wasn’t a regular thing? What?_ He listened intently. “You Vulcans demonstrate affection with your hands.”

“Doctor—”

“Don’t try to avoid it, Spock!” Bones barked. A second later, his tone softened in compassion. “I remember all the times we ferried dignitaries and ambassadors around on this ship. I saw my fair share of Vulcan couples. I distinctly recall your parents quite a few years back.” Kirk realized just how different Ambassador Spock’s universe was at the mention of both of Spock’s parents being alive, that both of them were on this ship, and that Bones met them and interacted with them. He understood with much sharper clarity why so much sadness lived in Ambassador Spock’s eyes. He must have lost _everything_. “What was it they did?” Bones pondered aloud. Kirk couldn’t see what he did, but he knew Bones must have been reenacting something, some gesture. “They touched fingers like this. I assume that’s something married Vulcans do, isn’t it?”

Kirk looked to Spock, knowing he would respond. He did so with a single, slow nod. Spock seemed reluctant to give even that much of an answer.

The smile was clear in Bones’s voice as he continued. “So that little display we all just witnessed here between you two could be called indecent, maybe even borderline obscene by Vulcan standards.”

Spock stared at the ceiling, refusing to meet the doctor’s gaze. But with an equal stubbornness, Bones did not take that avoidance as dismissal. He pressed, “After everything, even after trying to purge those pesky Human emotions, you still love Jim, don’t you?”

Kirk saw Spock close his eyes and begin to tremble on the biobed, fighting his emotions, fighting for control. He’d never heard of anything that would purge Spock of emotions, and he hoped he never would learn more about it in his universe. If he could even return to his universe. He really wasn’t sure that he could. Had this Spock struggled with his emotions his entire life? He’d seemed so much more open in the cave of Delta Vega than he was in this moment. Strangely, he felt like he shouldn’t even be witnessing this moment, shouldn’t even be in this universe. Yet he was also slightly angry at Bones, this older Bones, for asking such a personal question of Spock, such a private question. He opened his mouth to say that when Spock whispered so quietly he almost missed it. “Yes.”

Kirk flopped back onto the biobed, stunned. Spock loved him. _No,_ he corrected himself. _Spock loved_ his _Kirk, not me._ Ambassador Spock, the older Spock he knew, loved his version of James Tiberius Kirk. The realization left him speechless.

“No need to fret, Spock,” Bones said as he went to put away some of his smaller handheld equipment. “I have it on good authority that Jim feels the same about you.” Spock’s expression immediately blossomed with hope, but vanished beneath the shadow of regret as Bones added, “even after everything that happened.” Spock swallowed with visible difficulty and nodded slowly.

Kirk realized that he must have made some kind of sound, but quiet enough that only the Vulcan heard it. Spock turned his head to look directly at him. Kirk went rigid. _I don’t belong here. Does he know? Spock._ Only too late did Kirk realize he’d silently mouthed the Vulcan’s name.

And Spock noticed. The slanted brows came together in puzzlement as he stared at Kirk. His eyes flicked briefly to the door through which his captain, Kirk’s older counterpart had exited the Sickbay, before focusing back on the young man who stared back at him anxiously. Spock studied him in silence for what seemed like hours. “Jim?” Spock asked in confused amazement.

Bones, with his back turned to Spock, did not know of the interaction going on between the men lying in neighboring biobeds. He saved Kirk from his awkward reply without the doctor once turning around. “Yeah, Spock. We’ll get you up and about for Jim as soon as we can.”

Spock huffed and shook his head, but never once took his eyes from Kirk. “No, Doctor, you do not understand.”

Kirk felt strange, like a weight was pulling him under the surface of a lake and down into its depths.

Bones turned to face Spock. “What?”

Kirk heard the monitors above his biobed begin to scream as it registered that his body had taken a rapid turn towards oblivion.

Spock pointed towards Kirk. “Doctor! Jim!”

It seemed that Bones just registered the screaming alarms at Kirk’s bed. He rushed over. “Damnit! His wounds aren’t that severe! Nur—Doctor Chapel!” Kirk couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t lift his arms or move his legs. All he could do was stare at Spock, who stared back at him in horror, in grief. As he uselessly tried to give his lungs the oxygen they needed, involuntary tears slid from his eyes. “Damnit, we’re losing him!”

Just before his vision slipped into darkness, Kirk managed a small smile at Spock as the Vulcan cried out, “No!”

 

_“I dare you to do better.”_

He woke up lying in a biobed. _Spock,_ he cried in his mind, knowing his silent call would receive no answer. Immediately he knew he wasn’t on a starship. The natural light coming through the window gave that fact away. There were no screaming alarms for his failing vital signs. _Which means I’m alive._ He tried to calm his panicked breathing when the realization truly began to sink in. _I’m alive._ He closed his eyes, grateful that somehow Bones saved him.

_Bones!_

He opened his eyes and searched for the older version of his best friend. _Does he know who I am?_ But when movement caught his attention and he focused on the white-clad figure in the midst of turning to face him, Kirk stared in well-hidden surprise to see the Bones with whom he’d shared years of his life instead of the one his friend would one day become.

“Don’t be so melodramatic, you were barely dead,” Bones grumbled, raising a medical tricorder to Kirk’s left temple to take a reading. “It was the transfusion that really took its toll on you. You were out cold for two weeks.”

“Transfusion?” He had no idea what Bones was talking about. This entire conversation didn’t even seem like reality, but he did his best to focus on his friend and his words.

“Your cells were heavily irradiated. We had no choice.”

Then Kirk remembered. He remembered all of it. “Khan.” Going into that misaligned warp core, knowing he would likely die, barely making it back to the door, and hoping in vain that the decontamination process would complete quickly enough so that there would be a chance he could live. Only he hadn’t lived. Scotty had been there and begged him to hold on for a few minutes longer. Kirk had barely heard him call Spock, and it seemed to take hours for the Vulcan to show up, to lower himself on the other side of the transparent door. But he’d taken too long, there were so many things Kirk wanted – needed – to say. But he couldn’t say any of them before he felt his limbs get too heavy, felt his lungs giving up. He’d only just managed to slap his hand on the glass, watch as Spock mirrored the gesture, and offer one last smile to the one person he most wanted to tell that he loved. But the words never came, his eyes had gone dark, his lungs stopped working, his hand slid from the glass, and he slowly passed into oblivion.

Or so he’d thought.

He’d woken up in a Sickbay that wasn’t his Sickbay. He’d seen his older self, he’d seen the older Spock – Ambassador Spock – but in his younger years. And Bones. Bones was the least different out of the three of them. Spock clearly loved his James T. Kirk. And when that older version of himself had left the room, Spock had looked at him. _He knew me. He didn’t even ask. He just knew me._ Kirk thought of Delta Vega, frozen on the ground of the cave, his chest heaving and his muscles screaming from his desperate encounter with the terrifying creature that an old, stranded Vulcan had scared away with fire. The Vulcan had turned around and his expression instantly transformed with shock, surprise, and wonder as he greeted him by name. _“James T. Kirk.”_ Ambassador Spock knew immediately who he was in that cave because he’d already seen him decades ago in his past. That was why he knew him.

It took until now for Kirk to catch up with that encounter.

“Once we caught him, I synthesized a serum from his…superblood. Tell me, are you feeling homicidal, power-mad, despondent?”

“No more than usual.” He didn’t even know how he managed to answer Bones. His mind certainly wasn’t in the same place as his body. Kirk mentally shook the other Sickbay, the other universe, and all of the revelations he’d gained from his immediate thoughts. Bones said he’d been in a coma for two weeks. The least he could do was try to catch up with his current situation. He’d have time to think about the universe from, as far as he knew, he’d just come. He could think about Spock and Ambassador Spock later. “How’d you catch him?”

“I didn’t,” Bones said, then quickly retreated to go around the biobed to check readings and medications on Kirk’s left.

His movement revealed Spock, his first officer, lurking in the shadows of the room. _Apparently, I won’t be able to think about Spock later._ Spock stepped forward until he stood even at Kirk’s waist. Kirk couldn’t help the smile that stretched his lips. He thought that dying on the other side of that door would be the last time he would have the chance to tell Spock how he felt for him. _Perhaps second chances existed after all._

“You saved my life.”

Bones just had to ruin the moment for him. “Uhura and I had something to do with it too, you know.”

He didn’t want to deal with that right now. He needed to tell Spock. Bones could wait, everyone else could wait. Kirk was still alive for a reason, and he believed he knew that reason. That was the thing that mattered most to him in that moment.

But Spock had to open his mouth. “You saved my life, Captain, and the lives of—”

He shut him up as quickly as he could. “Spock, just—”  He looked at his first officer. _Can I tell him? Why else would I have seen_ that _moment with the other Spock if not to act on it with my own?_ “Thank you.” That wasn’t what he wanted to say. Why did he have so much trouble talking to Spock? _Take a breath and try again. You can do this!_ he encouraged himself.

“You are welcome, Jim.”

He looked at Spock, searching for a sign, anything, any indication that his Spock felt the same affection for him as the older Spock did for his James Kirk. He struggled to try to sit up, but flopped uselessly back into his pillow. “Jesus, Jim, don’t overdo anything. You just woke up from a _coma!_ ” Bones scolded in his own style of caring attention.

“Perhaps the captain should continue to rest,” Spock said, his hands coming to hang at his sides, as if unsure how to help Bones in his fussing with Kirk’s covers and resituating his atrophied body to a more comfortable position. Bones even carefully positioned Kirk’s head on the pillow.

“Bones, I’ve been resting for two weeks. I’m awake now. I’m fine.”

“I know, Jim,” Bones said, though the words sounded empty. “I just—I just want to make _sure_.” He started taking more readings. Bones cared for him deeply, and Kirk knew that, had always known that. But he wanted to know if Spock did too. He had to know.

“Spock?” he called quietly, while he raised his hand towards his first officer. He tried to do what he’d seen the older Spock do to his other self in the Sickbay.

Spock looked down at his hand and raised his eyebrow in clear surprise.

Kirk reached for Spock, silently offering his affection, his love, to the Vulcan.

With a simple but decisive motion, Spock slid his hands behind his back and out of Kirk’s reach.

His own hand fell back to the bed with a dull thud. He knew someone was speaking, but he couldn’t focus on the words. He heard nothing as the truth of Spock’s deliberate gesture hit him with more soul-chilling cold than the ice of Delta Vega.

Kirk felt everything for Spock, and Spock—

—felt nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! The majority of the dialogue in this does not belong to me. I borrowed it (except for the lines that are unrecognizable from the films - those are obviously mine) from The Motion Picture and Into Darkness. ~ RK


End file.
